TV's New Reality

TV's New Reality
How will the war affect what's on the tube?
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Monday, September 24, 2001 12:00 a.m. EDT

In the original scheme of TV's new fall season, "Lost" was simply the title of a new NBC reality show, in which contestants dropped in a remote land have to figure out where they are and find their way to New York. Then came Sept. 11. Reality TV was interrupted by the horror of real things lost, and though "Lost" resumes this week, the entire genre now feels like yesterday's news.

Meanwhile, television has risen to the moment, scrambling at every turn to cover the massive, awful and much-too-real story, heaving aside the carefully laid-out fall lineups in order to provide near-constant news of the crisis. This fast reaction has been a comforting reminder of how swiftly America can adapt when it really matters. TV shifted in minutes from offering a diet of idle diversions to a steady flow of mortally important news.

But one minor side effect of all this change is that anyone trying to sort out the new season's programming has probably also felt a little lost. Regular shows have been yanked, switched, clipped, postponed. Printed schedules are obsolete by the time they hit the street. "We're literally programming this network right now hour by hour, day by day," says a spokesman for CBS.

To some extent--barring any more sudden big news--the shuffling is likely to calm down this week. The networks will begin rolling out the delayed season premieres of such staples as "West Wing" (NBC, Wednesday, 9 to 10 p.m. EDT) and "ER" (NBC, Thursday, 10 to 11 p.m.). New reality shows that began their run before Sept. 11--not only "Lost" (NBC, Wednesday, 8 to 9 p.m.) but "The Amazing Race" (CBS, Wednesday, 9 to 10 p.m.)--will carry on. The lineup of postponed new spy shows, such as "The Agency" (CBS, Thursday, 10 to 11 p.m.) and "Alias" (ABC, Sunday, 9 to 10:10 p.m.), will begin to turn up.

But in the bigger picture, it's a good bet that a more basic shift in programming has only just begun. The past year's parade of reality, game and shame shows reflected a country almost bored with years of prosperity and relative calm. There was a demand for vicarious thrills. TV obliged, and viewers flocked to watch people bicker on tropical islands and eat or be covered with rats.

The boredom that produced such antics is gone. At bitter cost, Americans have suddenly acquired a sense of purpose keener than anything we have seen in generations. Flags flying, we appreciate our country, and have been rearranging our priorities. Two weeks ago, who could have imagined that hockey fans at a game in Philadelphia would demand, as they did last Thursday, that the match be stopped, so they could watch, live on the arena's big TV screen, a speech by the President?

The TV industry is now scrambling not only to cover the immediate events but to figure out for the longer haul what audiences in this revised national reality will want to watch. So far, the industry instinct has been to show us a great deal of genuine horror on the news and almost none in other programming. To pick just one example, NBC last Thursday pulled the scheduled repeat of its grotesque hit game show, "Fear Factor," and replaced it with the more viscerally benign sitcom "Friends." It has become standard for programs showing the World Trade Towers in the opening montage to edit them out--lest viewing pleasure be interrupted by distressing thoughts. Whether the opening sequence of "The Sopranos" will still show the twin towers in Tony's rear-view mirror when the fourth season starts next fall, and whether the attack on our country will turn up in the plot line, are questions an HBO spokesman says producer David Chase is "now grappling with."

Perhaps some delicacy in entertainment is an appropriate response right now to shock. But one might hope that over the coming months a different balance will evolve. In covering the recent news, TV has largely covered itself with honor because--in a departure from recent practice--it treated viewers as serious adults. We were watching something enormous and deadly. There was no room for the usual potted nonsense. (Though by late last week some of the blame-America-first voices were emerging from their bunkers, and CNN, between wrenching interviews with Trade Tower survivors, was bringing us such stuff as Bianca Jagger opining that suicide-terrorists could be stopped by "an international criminal court").

By and large, the time seems right for even our escapist TV entertainment to acquire a little more class. To return to the reality show "Lost," for example: Might there now be a growing demand for something a little less dumb? In the Sept. 5 pilot episode, teams of contestants were dropped in Mongolia, near the Gobi desert, cameramen as usual loping along behind them. After a brief bout of confusion in which one team, observing a few Asiatic people on the steppe, concluded they were in "Czechoslovakia," the players all began scrounging their way toward the capital of Ulan Bator, waving and whooping at baffled Mongolians en route--and doing the obligatory squabbling among each other. Presumably the teams will continue this process across more of Asia in the delayed second episode, now rescheduled for this Wednesday. Maybe on Sept. 5 this looked like exotic adventure. Now, if you flip the channel, there's suddenly no dearth of foreign scenery or true danger. We are flooded with footage of Pakistan, Tajikistan and especially Afghanistan--where American servicemen may soon risk their lives.

Or take another new reality show, "The Amazing Race," in which foreign lands likewise serve as a sort of scenic rat maze for teams of contestants racing (and bickering) toward a prize. At the start of the first episode, which also aired Sept. 5, a voice-over told us that the players "have no idea where they're going, what dangers they may encounter, or how the journey will affect their lives." By now, these lines sound a lot less appropriate to prize-seekers careening through Zambia and Paris than to our military pilots and soldiers, now saying goodbye to their families and heading off into the true unknown.

Finally, it's worth hoping the folks who tailor our entertainment to the times will not go overboard in trying to protect us from truths we know are out there. CBS last week scrapped the originally scheduled first episode of its new weekly fictional CIA drama, "The Agency," because the entire one-hour pilot was about the foiling of a bomb plot by Osama bin Laden. The series will now kick off this Thursday with a hastily assembled replacement episode, featuring, instead, a CIA attempt to stop an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro while he is visiting the U.S.

That switch is a pity, because the episode you won't see has some of TV's most intelligently written spy stuff in years. Filmed last April, this pilot program seems far better clued in to the terrorist perils of our brave new world than did most newscasters before Sept. 11. At one point, surveying the covertly obtained list of guests for a reception at the Kazak embassy in Washington, CIA agent Matt Callan (Gil Bellows) spots the name of Iraq's representative to the United Nations, and notes wryly, "He's probably got bin Laden on speed dial." There is also the satisfying outcome that the bin Laden bomb plot in this story is stopped, thanks to CIA handling of a Syrian embassy official who is finally persuaded to defect. As spy-show entertainment, especially for an American public now focused on some of the more pressing perils of our time, good fiction about bin Laden, Iraq and Syria seems more compelling than stories about the safety of that fusty old communist tyrant Fidel Castro.

Such are the kinds of decisions now up for grabs in Hollywood, where in the sphere of entertainment there is suddenly plenty to rethink about realities, ratings and the effects even on TV of America's newfound dignity and resolve.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board and a TV critic for the Journal's Leisure & Arts page. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."